


The Holly and Ivy

by Venivincere



Category: Merlin (TV)
Genre: Angst, M/M, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-08
Updated: 2019-01-08
Packaged: 2019-09-26 20:44:53
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,288
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17148803
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Venivincere/pseuds/Venivincere
Summary: "What can we do against the Hunt?" asked Arthur. "Cernunnos himself commands it. I do not know how to fight a god."





	The Holly and Ivy

**Author's Note:**

  * For [schweet_heart](https://archiveofourown.org/users/schweet_heart/gifts).



> Merlin Holidays 2018 gift for Schweet_heart. I hope it's everything you wanted. <3

They were only a league away from the castle in a holly grove when the gloaming flashed stark and white, crashing and rolling over them in a fundament-shaking rumble. Within moments, the skies opened up and commenced pouring on his exhausted cadre of knights. They hadn't been home from the Mercian border in a month. Somewhere just a few miles ahead his people prepared for Samhain, but the lights in the window calling them home were as good as a world away from the forest road. Arthur twisted around in his saddle at a growl, but it was only his knights, grumbling that they failed to make it home before the skies opened up. Merlin, for a change, was silent.

Arthur angled himself in his saddle so he could get a good look at him. "Enjoying the rain, Merlin?"

Merlin side-eyed Arthur's armour that he would have to clean, dry and oil before he could climb into his warm bed, and glared. "Oh, surely, sire."

Arthur laughed. "Well, we'll be home soon enough, and you can take up residence inside the fender with a joint and a pudding. After you've arranged my bath." The heavens followed up his pronouncement with a mighty, crackling crash.

"If we get home," said Merlin, glancing upward into the chaos. He pulled the blanket tighter over his shoulders just as the rain began to thunder down out of the skies and course over them in sheets. "This doesn't feel right, Arthur," he shouted over the tumult.

Arthur looked up just as another blast of light shocked the firmament. Thunder crashed directly on its heels, shaking the ground and the air around them. An unholy wail rose up in the branches. Another flash revealed, in stark, white detail, the remaining limbs of an ancient holly, twisting and beckoning in the tempest as they passed. Arthur looked back at Merlin as the light flashed again and caught a glimpse of his miserable face.

The light flashed yet again, blinding him, and then the world exploded.

:-----:

Arthur came to with rain running into his ears. His knights lay scattered on the ground nearby, groaning. The tempest subsided to a heavy, steady rain about them as his men stirred and rose. Most of the horses were gone.

"Merlin?" His knights were taking stock around them for stray gear and any sign of their missing horses, but Merlin was not among them. Arthur struggled to his feet and staggered back down the path into the trees. "Merlin!" he shouted, frustrated. Typical for Merlin to disappear in the middle of adversity, only to return once the tide had turned in their favor. Wherever he was, Arthur hoped he'd return with the rest of the horses.

"Help me look for Merlin," Arthur yelled to his men. They dragged sticks through the deep leaf mould in case Merlin were buried under the leafy loam of the forest floor. But Merlin was nowhere to be found. They returned along the path to the grove, and it was only then that Arthur saw that the ancient holly they had been passing was cloven in two.

:-----:

His chambers were too warm when he woke, and aside from the madly crackling fire, so very quiet. But there was daylight behind his eyelids, and he wondered what nonsense Merlin was up to now, before memory crashed into him and pinned him tight under the covers. Three days, and he hadn't yet returned. His best trackers had been out searching since they arrived home, but they found nothing. Not even a scrap of clothing. Arthur swallowed, and swallowed again, and didn't dare open his eyes until the lump swelling his throat subsided.

"Sire," said a small voice at his pillow. Arthur craned his neck to find a slight youth trying very, very hard to rouse him out of bed with the least amount of disturbance possible. The boy pointed to Arthur's table. "Your breakfast."

Arthur blinked at him and sighed. "Very well. Leave me."

The young man -- what was his name again? -- muttered, "Yes, Sire," as he tiptoed to the door and backed out of it silently. The moment the door latch clicked, Arthur sprang up and dressed himself. The more he thought about it, the more Merlin's disappearance smacked of magic, and there was only one person in the kingdom he felt comfortable talking to about magic. With luck, Gaius will have already found a way to rescue Merlin.

:-----:

"Gaius," Arthur called, entering into his physician's chambers in nothing but his gambeson, tights, and a pair of soft, sheepskin slippers Merlin had fashioned for him after he broke two toes dancing with Lady Elena at Beltane. "Have you found anything?"

Gaius straightened up from the book he was reading. His eyes drooped with fatigue. "Sire," he said, creaking slowly to his feet. "I'm afraid that for all my research I don't have a clear answer."

Arthur stared, and swallowed once. "What do you know?"

Gaius winced down at his hands. "I don't know, Sire. Magic. Wild magic, mayhap. But without examining the area where he was taken..." Gaius raises his eyes to Arthur, forehead wrinkled with more than just age.

Arthur places his hands on the table between them and leans in. "What is it that you fear?"

Gaius sighs, and meets Arthur's gaze. "That he's been taken, Sire. By the Wild Hunt."

"Be ready in the courtyard in ten minutes." Arthur pushes himself away from the table and eats up the distance to the door in two strides. "We're going to the forest."

"Thank you, Sire," said Gaius, but Arthur was already slipping out the door.

"Ten minutes! I'll be waiting in the courtyard with your mount," said Arthur, ignoring the muttering fading behind him as he called for his boots and horses.

:-----:

"Holly, Sire." said Gaius, unable to hide his despair.

Arthur stared at the giant, hoary trunk with its jagged, branched crown like the antlers of a stag. He remembered it with fewer branches, but perhaps the poor dusk light in the storm had only partially revealed the remainder of the tree. The outside of the trunk looked worn and old, but the wood inside still looked healthy and green, only just exposed to the elements. Singularly strange, which in Arthur's experience, meant magic.

"There was a gale fit to blow down the entire forest, and a bolt of lightning that knocked us clean off our horses." said Arthur. "This is strange, though," he said, pointing to the ripped wood in the crown, still green and wet. "Surely it should show a bit of weathering by now." 

He peered down the path deeper into the forest. The trackers had examined the forest floor surrounding the path all the way back to the Crystal Cave, but had found no one. Arthur swallows. "No one else was blown away. I know I make fun of him being slight," said Arthur with pang in his gut, "but... he's strong, really.

"I wouldn't be here without him." Arthur acknowledged, perching on a fallen tree and patting the bark next to him. "Come sit."

Gaius creaked down next to Arthur and blew out a tremulous sigh. "Perhaps, neither would I. Sire, I am very sorry."

Arthur believed him; it appeared that he was even more sorry than he'd been when Uther passed. Arthur, in the last days of his youth, watched with not a little jealousy as Merlin and Gaius' relationship blossomed. He can laugh at himself, now that he's grown and no longer quite so callow. And he can be happy for Merlin, that despite Merlin's loss of his own father when he was wee, he had the guidance of a steady friend and mentor in Gaius, as he grew into a man. 

Arthur stared into the middle distance, eyes drawn to the holly. He thought back to his own childhood, spent in Gaius' chambers, learning to read, learning to think like a tactician, like a learned man. Much of himself that wasn't a warrior, much of himself that made him a beloved and trusted King even beyond the borders of Camelot, came from the lessons and guidance of the man sitting next to him, staring at the holly, too, silently crying.

Arthur, feeling that Gaius' shared mentorship contributed to the happy, anchored nature of his relationship with Merlin, let his own eyes fill and run off into the ground.

"What can we do against the Hunt?" asked Arthur a while later, when their quiet, sorrowful communion trickled off into occasional sniffles and sighs. "Cernunnos himself commands it. I do not know how to fight a god."

"I am but a man, Sire, and old. I could not best another man, let alone a god."

Arthur rose, stamping the chill from his legs with perhaps a little more force than necessary.

Gaius continued, "But where fighting fails, perhaps pleas might prevail."

Arthur turned on his heel. "Prayer?!"

"Yes, Sire. Surely you noticed that the holly wood is still fresh and green?" Gaius rose and peeked into the broken holly crown to the green wood within. "And growing."

Arthur startled, and came to lean in next to Gaius. There, in the center of the heartwood, a slender, green shoot, as the forest around them settled into winter sleep.

"Where there is life, there is hope," said Arthur, resolved, though he did not know how.

:-----:

He rose early to avoid the quiet boy who silently set his food upon the table, stoked the fire too high, and was not Merlin. Each day he took his breakfast out under the broken holly crown, amazed at the rapid, new growth. Each morning, in the chilly, pink rays of the sun, he scattered his crusts and cores, and poured the remainders from his flagon at the foot of the hoary, twisted old holly, willing it health and begging for Merlin's return. The sere browns of November changed to the sparkling of frost that glittered every color in the morning light and waxed and waned with his breath on the branches of the healing holly crown.

As the days went on, the shoot became a slender trunk that absorbed the jagged, green remains as it grew. The morning of Yule, Arthur could no longer tell where the old tree left off and the new tree began. The branches remained bare, but the crown was healed, and the branches left the center in even rays around, a diadem worthy of a god. But Merlin was not returned.

Arthur set his breakfast aside uneaten and let his tears drop to the frozen ground. The robins came, and the goldfinches, becoming very bold after a while and pecking at the cloth-wrapped bread. They chattered and bickered, and reminded Arthur very much of Merlin in the morning. He swallowed, and opened a fold of the cloth to let the birds have at it.

A hand landed on Arthur's shoulder. "Is that my breakfast?"

Arthur twisted and stood in one, swift motion. There, there close in front of him was Merlin, still in his travel clothes with the thick travel blanket wrapped around him.

Arthur had no words; all the pleas and prayers of the last month and a half gone out of him, and he fell into Merlin in a silent embrace.

:-----:

"He was injured," Merlin said, "during the Hunt."

Arthur poured the wine from his flagon into Merlin's cup, and let Merlin twine bluebells in his hair for the Maying. He'd never asked, and wondered why Merlin chose now to tell him.

Merlin stopped his hands and exhaled a shaky breath. "He needed me to heal him."

Arthur reached up and pulled Merlin's hands into his own. He held them, felt their quiet power between his fingers: the hands of a man who could heal a god.

Powerful magic indeed. He should be afraid, he should confront Merlin, he should demand explanations, visit retribution upon him, cast him out. But the thought of doing any of those things felt far more wrong than letting this powerful man burrow his way further into Arthur's heart.

After the dancing and singing and the copious spring ale, after Merlin lead a very tipsy Gaius off to bed, and Arthur's knights paired off with maidens and disappeared into the dark, Arthur drew Merlin away from the light of the Beltane fires and into the woods. They entered the grove where the holly stood, hale and hearty, and lay down between the roots under its crown.

"I heard you, every day, from inside the tree," said Merlin. "So many tears, just for me."

"I needed you, and you were gone."

Merlin turned on his side and laid his hand over Arthur's heart. "I'm here now."

Arthur hitched over on his side and twined his fingers in Merlin's hair. He pulled Merlin close and kissed him. "Hopefully forever," he said. And, not questioning his instincts, he drew Merlin closer and joined with him in love and life and body until they both spilled hot and fast between them.

They woke in the dawn light to find their arms entwined with soft, new tendrils of ivy and a feast laid about them: cress and nuts and sweet, cool water in Arthur's flagon. The robins and finches gathered in the fresh green of new leaves hazing the crown of the holly and sang to them while they ate.

:-----: 

They left the grove hand in hand as the sun tipped over the horizon and fell up into the sky. And though chance and battle and the birth of a kingdom tried them harder than any taskmaster in the years to come, a god held them tight together.

They did not part again in this life.


End file.
